Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town is an indie movie released in 2018. I just watched it a few weeks ago and to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with it and something about it kept bothering me. The movie hasn’t completely left my mind for weeks and I guess this review is my attempt to find out the reason.
So I’ve read a few other reviews about the movie and the word everyone keeps using to describe it is charming. See, I don’t necessarily agree with that. It kind of feels like a movie that had the potential to be charming but it really wasn’t. There were a few moments in the movie where it kind of slowed down and tried to be meditative – for the lack of a better word. But it just didn’t feel coherent. The woman she meets after she was stabbed by the syringe. That whole scene – it was like I could understand what it was trying to say – but I couldn’t really feel it. It was the same thing with the opening scene of the main character in three different time stages. The metaphor was obvious but somehow it didn’t hold any emotional weight for me.
The other problem I had with the movie was that Roger was one of the nicest characters in the movie, relatively, based on what we see of the other characters. So her ditching him doesn’t feel like some kind of dick move she makes because that’s how her character was portrayed. I mean it would have seemed that way if they hadn’t made the rest of the characters equally unlikable. People in this movie’s universe are very unlikable and they are shown to be doing really selfish and stupid stuff anyway. This takes away from what was made to feel like Izzy’s defining character. So, her leaving him does not look like an act of rebellion or of her not remaining true to herself. She does not come off as the anti-hero the film is trying to portray her as.
So, the ending didn’t have any emotional impact on me personally, mainly for this reason.
If this problem was solved somehow, this would have been such a good movie. And that I guess is why it’s still on my mind. I mean the movie had heart and you can say that about so few movies these days. The sad thing was that while you could see and appreciate what they were doing, you couldn’t feel it.
